Past and Present Environments

In his book, Maldonato provides a thoughtful look at how early scholars viewed decision-making and rationality. He takes the reader on an illustrative journey through the historic passages of decision-making all the way to modern notions of a more limited rationality and how humans can make choices under risk and uncertainty. He discusses Kahneman and Tversky’s seminal work on heuristics and biases— “short cuts” that rely on little information and modest cognitive resources that sometimes lead to persistent failures, but usually allow the decision-maker to make fast and fairly reliable choices. Herbert Simon and Gerd Gigerenzer’s work on bounded rationality is discussed, with respect to its influence on decision-making research in economics and psychology. For Maldonato, the principle of bounded rationality—that organisms have limited resources, such as time, information, and cognitive capacity with which to find solutions to the problems they face—is a key insight to understanding the evolution of decision-making. Maldonato proposes that evolutionary pressures urged the human mind to adopt a primitive decision-making process. For the purpose of survival, the majority of human choices had to be made by means of simple and fast decision strategies, because the decision-making system developed under general human cognitive limitations and from environmental pressures that selected for decision strategies suited for the harsh ancestral living environments as well as the resources at hand. However, to evaluate the rationality of a behavior, one must consider not only the limitations of the decision-maker’s cognitive system, but also the constraints and demands placed on her or him by the environment. This consideration, unfortunately, is not thoroughly explored. Maldonato alludes to the important role the environment plays in decision-making, but he does not elaborate in the same way empirical research in evolutionary cognitive psychology has in recent years. Nor does he show how earlier theoretical work—often outlined by the same authors he cites—meant human decision-making and cognition to be understood.